The combined value of the 10 largest class action settlements in 2025 was a record-breaking $79 billion, according to Duane Morris' 2026 Class Action Review. The review also counted 13,229 class action lawsuits filed in federal courts in 2025, a pace the report puts at more than 52 filed every court day.
This isn't the result of one bad year for corporate defendants. It's the new baseline. By the same review's count, the settlements of the past four years total more than $238 billion, a run it calls unmatched in American legal history. That is the environment corporate legal departments are now budgeting against.
The Anatomy of the Record
In November 2025, Visa and Mastercard reached a $38 billion settlement with a class of merchants who alleged the card networks charged excessive fees to accept credit cards. That single deal accounts for nearly half the record. Retailer trade groups opposed the deal anyway, saying it left the underlying fee-setting system intact.
Blue Cross Blue Shield's $2.8 billion settlement resolved claims from hospitals, physicians, and other providers who said they were underpaid on reimbursements. It won final approval in August 2025. In House v. NCAA, the court signed off in June 2025 on a settlement committing $2.78 billion in back damages to Division I athletes.
Vendors of automotive technology alleged CDK Global colluded with Reynolds & Reynolds to inflate the price of data integration services. That case settled for $630 million. And poultry processors including Perdue Farms, Tyson Foods, and Butterball won final approval of a $398 million settlement fund for workers who accused the companies of conspiring to suppress their pay.
The list spans payments, health insurance, college sports, dealer software, and poultry processing. But all five are antitrust cases and antitrust holds most of the money. The record's breadth shows up in the filing volume and in the six areas of class action law where the 10 biggest settlements in each added up to more than a billion dollars: antitrust, consumer fraud, generative AI and crypto, government enforcement, products liability, and securities fraud.
By the review's tally, 2025 was the fourth consecutive year the 10 largest settlements cleared $40 billion. What changed is how far past the mark the year went.
New on the Board: AI and Crypto
In 2025, for the first time, the review began tracking generative AI and crypto class actions as a new settlement category. It is not where the money is. That category totaled $1.59 billion against antitrust's $45.99 billion. But the cases are moving quickly.
Anthropic agreed in September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion to a class of authors whose books it had downloaded from pirate libraries, roughly $3,000 a work. A judge had already held that training on the books was fair use. The remaining question was how Anthropic got the books. Final approval came in July 2026.
The first wrongful-death suit against an AI chatbot maker, brought by the mother of a 14-year-old against Character Technologies, settled in January 2026 along with four related cases. Terms were not disclosed and no court ever ruled on liability. The family of a 16-year-old who died by suicide sued OpenAI in August 2025. That case is in pretrial with no trial date set.
The crypto settlements are smaller. The court gave preliminary approval in August 2025 to a roughly $13 million deal between former BlockFi executives and customers of the crypto lender's interest accounts. A small base and fast-moving cases are what make generative AI and crypto the category to watch in 2026.
Why the Numbers Keep Climbing—The "Snowball Effect"
"We're seeing a snowball effect, where high settlement numbers are inspiring more lawsuits and even bigger settlements," Jennifer Riley, partner and vice chair of Duane Morris' class action defense team, told CFO Dive.
A $79 billion headline tells every plaintiffs' firm and every funder behind them what a claim can be worth. Bigger expected value pulls in more filings, and more filings pull in more capital.
The filing data backs her up. The same report's circuit numbers show where the pace is accelerating: filings in the Ninth Circuit are up 67% since 2022, one of four federal circuits where they have grown by more than half.
Third-party litigation funding took hold in the United States around 2010 and has matured into a growing commercial market, according to a Government Accountability Office review that also found the market opaque: funders' returns and total funding volumes go largely undisclosed.
The defense bar reads the same numbers as a warning. The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a property-casualty trade group, argued in a statement submitted to a House Judiciary subcommittee that funders now influence which cases get brought, how long they run and when they settle, all without transparency, and that climbing verdicts and litigation costs are eroding the affordability of insurance.
What This Means for Corporate Risk Management
If you manage litigation exposure for a company, the temptation is to dismiss $79 billion as enormous, rare, and somebody else's problem. The AI cases show why that would be a mistake. For a defendant, a novel legal theory once meant years of doctrine building before real money moved.
Anthropic's case was still pretrial when it agreed to pay $1.5 billion and Character Technologies resolved five suits without a liability ruling. Funded plaintiffs' firms now price early settlement pressure into claims the law has not caught up with.
Size your settlement reserves accordingly. Calibrate them to the litigation categories your company actually touches, whether that is payments, wage antitrust, AI products, or data privacy, rather than to last year's docket.
Bring the trajectory into your next D&O renewal. Underwriters can price documented governance, so walk in with the board minutes, risk reviews, and oversight history that show it.
Build the AI paper trail now. Inventory every AI use and every vendor. Document where training data came from and what the marketing promised. Map every screening or eligibility tool against bias-claim exposure. Courts have already let discrimination claims over algorithmic decision making proceed against the software vendor itself, in a case alleging a hiring tool filtered out older applicants before a human ever reviewed them.
That vendor exposure runs through your contracts. Renegotiate indemnification, audit rights, and testing attestations with every AI and HR software vendor before a lawsuit allocates those risks for you.
Decide before a suit lands which theories you would fight and which you would price. Write the criteria down.
And treat litigation funding as a strategy question in its own right. Ask for disclosure in discovery where courts allow it. Assume a funded plaintiff has budgeted for a longer fight than the complaint suggests.
Will the Record Last?
In February 2026, Bayer announced a $7.25 billion proposed settlement covering most of the roughly 65,000 claims in U.S. courts alleging its Roundup weedkiller caused cancer, plus future ones. None of that money counts toward 2025's record and none of it is final. The consolidated litigation over social media and adolescent mental health also remains unresolved, with no global settlement.
Whether 2026 tops the record is an open question. For corporate legal departments, $79 billion is the floor now, not the ceiling.
